With a dream list of investors and the goal of helping people give better gifts more quickly, social mobile commerce company Karma Science is launching Tuesday.

The idea came as easily as the venture cash.

Co-founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis (who previously co-founded mobile app platformTapjoy) wanted to do more than just post a note on Facebook when they’d find out about a friend’s birthday, engagement, new job or other major event. But actually getting to the store to buy a card or gift, finding the person’s current address and then getting it in the mail was cumbersome and didn’t always happen.

With Tapjoy already established–it generated more than $100 million in annual revenue last year–they felt it was time for something new.

“We had a vision, but no team,” said Linden, who shared his plan for instant gifting with select investors and then raised less than $5 million in an equity round last summer. In an unusual case of co-investing, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital co-led the Series A with participation from the Obvious Corp. (run by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone), Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Stephen Gillett and unnamed angel investors.

Then Linden and Lewis began building their team, interviewing “hundreds” and hiring less than 20 who have spent the past eight months in San Francisco stealthily building apps for iOS and Android.

The app, which can now be downloaded for free, does a couple of things. The first and hardest thing it does is conduct a semantic analysis of a users’ Facebook feed, sifting through and eliminating noise about cute cats tricks and kale recipes to find the important stuff. The app measures both words and engagement metrics to discover when events such as a birth or a death occur, and then notifies the user. The user can then choose from a list of companies that Karma has partnered with, including Domaine Chandon, Gund, Jawbone, MOMA Design and 23andme, to send a gift.

The user also sends an e-card and can choose to send it and the gift to their friend via text, email or Facebook.

The user gets notified when the recipient reads the card and opens the gift, which the recipient is then invited to exchange (if they don’t like the color or size) and input their shipping address. When the user receives the correct address, they input their credit card information and the partner company ships it to a Karma fulfillment warehouse, which then gift-wraps and ships it.

Although the company is launching today, it has been in beta since December and generating revenue as a percentage of transactions since then. Karma collects and analyzes data from the transactions in aggregate and, although Linden said it will never share information about individuals, it will share commerce data about age groups, genders and events with its partners.

One of the biggest surprises so far, he said, was the fact that people respond to text messages in less than a minute while emails are read five hours later and Facebook postings are read the following day, on average.

“They’re extracting emotional intensity from the social graph and allowing consumers to act on it in ways they want to,” said Kleiner Perkins partner Chi-Hua Chien. “It feels like magic because you get that feedback immediately from the recipient.”

Chien and Bing Gordon worked on the deal on behalf of Kleiner while Tim Lee and Jim Goetz represented Sequoia Capital.

The two Silicon Valley heavyweights have only co-invested in the same round 21 times in the past ten years, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, with many of those companies like Google, Symantec and Electronic Arts becoming titans.

Linden said sitting at the same table negotiating with both firms simultaneously was “interesting.”

“There was no battle per se, but when they invest, they each want to own as much as they can,” he said, adding he has no immediate plans to raised a Series B.

UPDATE: This story was changed to clarify that Stephen Gillett is an independent investor. It was also changed to correct which Sequoia Capital investors were involved in the deal.

Comments (1 of 1)

Facebook paid in stock of course probably millions for this less than 90 day old company, boy did Zuck really suck the money out of Wall Cheat he is just like Madoff but he is doing it the legal way... FB is a the short of the century for sure...

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